Halfway There

Whisper it quietly, but the planet is half the way toward getting everyone fully vaccinated against COVID.

According to this chart from Our World In Data, at least 50 percent of the global population has gotten both doses of a COVID vaccine, and, in breaking numbers on further, as seen in the statistics at the bottom of the chart, fully vaccinated people in this earth account for a bare majority - 50.33 percent as of this past Monday, January 10.

This is good news, of course, but as always in this pandemic, it comes with a caveat.  Several caveats, in fact.  First, it took thirteen months to get this far, meaning that at current rates of vaccination, it would theoretically take until February 2023 to everyone on the planet jabbed - and we know that many people refuse to get the shot anyway.  Second, while many countries are far along on full COVID vaccination, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa continue to lag dramatically; while more than half of the people on the various continents and in Oceania are vaccinated, only 9.7 percent of the people of Africa are fully vaccinated.  Third, at least two strains of the virus, including Omicron, came from South Africa, and others could come from African countries as random as Gabon or Zambia.  Any one of them could be the doomsday strain that humanity has no way to protect against.

The pandemic can end this year, but it won't until we get all of those people in Africa vaccinated.  The United States should approach the 70 percent minimum full-vaccination threshold some time this spring, and there will still be holdouts.  Once we've gotten as many Americans vaccinated as possible, it's more than imperative to get Africa and other areas of the world vaccinated.  And, given all of the new strains that keep sprouting up like so many gremlins from an eighties popcorn movie,  we can't wait until February 2023 to do so.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is already getting over a million COVID infections a day and hospitalizations have hit a new record high. 😢